Must read Google piece in Guardian; "Google... big friendly giant or greedy Goliath?"

Kudos to David Smith of the Gaurdian Observer for his outstanding piece on Google as it turns ten years old.

• Its a must read for anyone interested in Google or the future of the Internet. 

Some of my favorite insights from the piece are highlighted below:  

• Google "has the potential to reach into every corner of our lives, from the way we get news, watch entertainment and do our jobs to the way we communicate, seek information and comprehend the world."
• "But Keen has a warning about the gatekeepers of cyberspace. 'They have amassed more information about people in 10 years than all the governments of the world put together. They make the Stasi and the KGB look like the innocent old granny next door."
• "Google's tentacles are everywhere. It runs services for blogging, email, instant messaging, shopping and social networking. It offers a suite of word processing, spreadsheet and other tools to rival Microsoft's products in the workplace. It is building a software platform for mobile phones that may challenge Apple's iPhone and others. It has just launched Knol, a peer-reviewed encyclopedia to take on Wikipedia. In America, Google Health enables users to maintain their own medical records. The company is also working on language translation, speech recognition and video search."
• "Orlowski of The Register says: 'It's the big regulatory issue of the next 10 years: how politicians deal with Google. If the web is as important as the politicians say, it seems odd that one company sets the price and defines the terms of business.'"
• "'The problem with Google now is that they have to keep growing,' says Andrew Keen. 'If they wanted to, they could destroy the publishing business and kill newspapers."

Bottom line: More and more people are comprehending the extraordinary significance of Google's: exceptional dominance, lack of competition and accountability, and threat to most everyone's privacy.  Beware.